Christine de Pizan’s Changing Opinion: A Quest for Certainty in the Midst of Chaos (review)

Douglas Kelly has always had interesting things to say on Christine, ever since his 1972 article in Sub-Stance, ‘Reflections on Christine de Pisan as a Feminist Writer.’ In this volume, Kelly provides one of the few book-length studies thus far to treat Christine as an important thinker, in virtually all her works—not just the Cité des Dames—including her lyric poetry.

Kelly clearly lays out his elegant (in the scientific-theoretical sense) plan of inquiry in his introduction, then successfully fulfills it, in this study so replete with profoundly thoughtful and questioning readings of Christine’s works, while deftly incorporating a broad command of previous scholarship, that only a rapid sketch can be given here. Chapter 1 deals with Christine’s opinion as a concept, mainly as defined in the Debate of the Romance of the Rose, and also in the Mutacion de Fortune and Chemin de long estude, while Chapter 2 treats opinion as personification, via the central sibylline shade, Lady Opinion, of her 1405 Advision (which also happens to contain the personification of Chaos). Chapter 2 also examines how Opinion came to usurp Fortune, the central personification of the earlier Mutacion de Fortune and some lesser works, as prime mover of all types of misery in the poet’s developing vision of her own life and milieu, aided by a fundamentally Boethian and Thomist Lady Philosophy.

In Chapters 3 through 5, Kelly traces the metamorphoses of Christine’s opinion on the crucial issues of misogyny (Ch. 3), ideal love (Ch. 4), and socio-political self-interest (Ch. s5) throughout almost all pertinent works, on dialectical and textual levels. Throughout these chapters, Kelly cultivates revealing symmetries, paradoxes and differences in Christine’s convictions over time, often connected with her notions of passion vs. ‘true sentiment’ and reason vs. ‘law,’ yet without anachronistically distorting her texts or the late-medieval rhetorical principles and definitions informing them. We see, for instance, her evolving attitude toward misogyny—from acceptance to ambivalence to condemnation—following a pattern similar to her reactions to ideal or ‘courtly’ love; always weighing how she could best convey her opinion, whether in poetry or prose, as her career matured. In Chapter 5, Kelly elucidates the didactic-polemical architectonic parallels between the revisionist Cité des Dames and her ‘corrective’ encomiastic biography of Charles V, to explain her passage from the merely ‘epideictic’ metaphor of the body politic to a new political philosophy finally embracing self-interest, initially condemned by her, as a positive force for political harmony and the common good.

The sixth and final chapter takes another tack by situating Christine’s opinion within current scholarly interest in medieval literary subjectivity (responding more to Zink’s ideas than to Haidu’s). This chapter also seals the author’s initial suggestion that, despite certain differences, her self-representation via changing opinion heralds Rabelais (though Kelly could have probed this resemblance farther, e. g., consulting Bordessoule’s 1994 Constructions article), and especially Montaigne, in this regard more than any other writer before them.

In sum, Kelly demonstrates that her mutable opinion is more a deliberate, rather than fortuitous or aberrant, facet of formulating and promulgating her agenda in relation to her volatile, chaotic times, whose constant changes emerge as the one certainty that she must not only accept but utilize, even exploit, in order to master herself and surrounding events. Furthermore, her status as anomaly heightens, rather than hinders, her unique use of opinion so attuned to, yet distinct from, those of her contemporaries—a quality guaranteeing her significance for our time as well. Yet this book does much more; even some of the footnotes contain real gems.

One need not agree with all of Kelly’s interpretations—as for instance when he occasionally takes her rhetorical postures at face value (e. g. Cité des Dames beginning) or...